It's been While since i'm using dash(-) in unix command. But have never found out what exactly is this.
Have searched at some place it says . It mean stdin/stdout when used in end of command or like ...

I have a dash script, and I need to parse $1, which is a string containing two parts separated by ':', such as foo:123. I would like to to save foo in $X and 123 in $Y.
I thought I could use read:
$ ...

Everytime I use my terminal, I am always put into the dash shell instead of bash. Is there any way to change this even just for my user only? Tried apt-alternatives but setting the default shell can't ...

For a long time I have been wondering about the existence of many shells in GNU/Linux. To make the question a bit focused I have used only three shells - bash, dash and zsh.
From wikipedia articles ...

After looking around for a while I've found several good pages describing how to check and see if a bash script is running interactively and there seem to be several methods, but one of them that I ...

I've noticed that basically no system I've ever worked with has /bin/sh as a real executable. It's always a symlink to dash, bash in POSIX mode, or something similar.
Why? What are the disadvantages ...

I used alien to convert an RPM to a .deb. I did NOT use alien's script conversion; I'm converting by hand. Indeed, the script did barf on some non-compatible syntax. My question is NOT about how to ...

I'm using dash(sh) or bash or zsh. If possible, I would prefer to put in common place.
I want to put proper PS1 settings when I interactive with shell, so these situation should be considered
login ...

I am very confused about the login script for bash. I have always used ~/.bash_profile to configure my bash shell. Now I am on a new system just as a user: I am not root. This system was originally ...

I know this has been poorly covered previously, but those answers either lack explanation or don't apply.
Basically at some point my scripts needs check if a file is specified, if it was it will be ...

How can I write a script that basically just runs pkill -HUP inetd? I want to restart inetd via a script so I can schedule it to run at a particular time. I tried to write it myself, but I'm getting a ...

I'm using getopts for all of my scripts that require advanced option parsing, and It's worked great with dash. I'm familiar with the standard basic getopts usage, consisting of [-x] and [-x OPTION]. ...

I would like to trace a shell script for debugging purposes without having to modify its source code (e.g. change the shebang or insert a set -x at the beginning). It is a dpkg postinst script, so not ...

I prefer to do my sh commands in shorthand, And I prefer to be in POSIX. Truthfully, if the script can run on Dash, that is good enough. Which means using the test command [, not the extended [[.
I ...

I decided that I want to learn more about Linux and try building LFS. I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 as host system and Ubuntu uses dash and mawk by default. I've changed mawk to gawk, but considering that ...